Nutrition
Software

More and more people want to know the
nutritional value of the meals they eat. This is not
necessarily an easy thing to figure out unless you hire a
nutritional consultant or have a computer program that
will do the calculations for you. Most packaged food has
the nutrient content listed on the label, but only for the
major nutrients. The nutrients that are contained in small
amounts are not even listed. But after eating several
meals all these values add up. You can use a reference
book and calculate your daily totals by hand but that
takes quite a while. I wrote a program
called NutritionAccess that allows
you to track calories and nutrients in the meals you eat.
A database of over 5000 foods is included in this
comprehensive and easy to use program. You can record all
the foods that you eat in specific meals and the program
will report on the nutritional value of each of these
meals. Read more about Zolosoft Nutrition
Software.

News of interest on
the Paleo Diet

Many people who recommend the Paleo diet as a healthy eating
strategy claim that early humans probably did not eat grain so
we don't really have the biochemical framework for properly
digesting and metabolizing these foods. While browsing
nutrition articles on Science Daily I a came across an
article on the discovery of ancient cereal grinding tools in a
cave in Africa.

Julio Mercader is an archeologist at the University of
Calgary. While investigating archeologic remnants at a cave in
Mozambique, he found dozens of stone tools including grinding
stones that were used in food preparation. When he
analyzed the grinding stones, he found starch grains from wild
sorgham, which is an ancestor of the cereal grain still used
today in much of Africa. The samples were dated to a time
over 100,000 years ago. This is the oldest example of the
extensive use of grains by early humans. Until this discovery
it was generally believed that grains were not utilized this
long ago.

"This broadens the timeline for the use of grass seeds by
our species, and is proof of an expanded and sophisticated diet
much earlier than we believed," said Mercader.

The study was published in the December 18, 2009 issue of
Science, with the title "Mozambican grass seed consumption
during the Middle Stone Age."